Stuff About Starcraft

Receently I’ve started to listen to podcasts while at work. I probably should not confess to that, but so be it. Among those I have enjoyed the most are Day[9]’s small rants and tips about Starcraft. If you haven’t listened to them yet, go do it now. His latest rant is about how it is sometimes useful to drop down to D level, to find opponents that won’t give you too much trouble. I wonder what I should do, when I have enough problems simply staying at D ;-)?

Another Starcraft player RushFlush recommended this NonY FPVOD for the Protoss vs. Protoss. It is pretty good as well and in fact I used it to beat RushFlush recently. It is that good ;-)!

Finally a new version of AdvLoader for 1.16.1 has been released. The launcher looks aweful, but in game the obs mode is awsome and the ability to have live APM in the game has really helped me play better. It is also very educational to watch replays and compare the economy of players as the game progress.

Tournament

Back when Starcraft was new I hosted a lot of tournaments on my site www.teamladder.dk, and I’ll probably do the same when Starcraft 2 comes out. Just to “warm up” again I had volunteered to host a new tournament for Danes last Sunday.  14 players showed up (which I think is a lot for a small country like mine) and the games were played in an orderly fashion.

The level of play showed by the players were very different (at one point I played a 350 apm guy). The tournament system I had decided on was a swiss style tournament rather than single elimination, so every one got to play 4 games.

My first game was against RushFlush: A guy I have practiced against a couple of times. Last time I played him in a friendly we went Protoss vs. Protoss on Destination and he crushed my dark templar rush with no trouble. We met each other again on the very same map and this time I won with his very own build! I felt so proud!

The next three games (2, 3 & 4) progressed pretty badly though, so overall I still suck badly. Fortunately the tournament overall  was a huge success, so maybe my future in Starcraft is more in administration than in gaming :-(.

I’ve had enough

I’m furious and I have had enough of this sh!t. I keep thinking that I am steadily improving and then I play a game so badly that I totally embarrass myself. I even won this one game and yet when I ended up in chat I had to scream at something to get my frustrations out.

Basically I played Protoss (as usual) against a random, that ended up as zerg. I hate playing against random race players, as I usually have an opening prepared for each match up. So I had to two gate a zerg on Python rather than a fast expand.

My opponent claimed that this was his first game in two years and he played really badly, so that was probably true. Most of the game I had him contained to two bases and I owned the map. Yet it took me 32 minutes to finish him off and I had to loose my main 3 times due to doom drops.

I think I suck at striking the right balance between being careful when ahead and actually using the advantage I have. In this case I pressed my advantage too much and was wide open for drops in my main. Not once, but three times. Yuck.

As a bonus I have another game here, that shows the exact same thing although I feel it played out just a little better. In this case I scouted my opponent going hydralisks and prepared for that. When he a little later switched to mutalisks he got to rape my main and my natural expansion for free.

All in all it was a better game though and there were a lot of other things I did right. Realizing that dark templars are quite powerful early on vs zerg for instance and that you can do without observers for a while :-).

Oh and I think my new favorite unit is the archon.

The Cost of a Trip to New York

So I went to New York City for a week and now I’m sitting jet-lagged trying to asses the cost of the trip. Besides the obvious $2500 I spend, I had to do a series of test games against the Entropy mod to see how it changed my APM. Before the trip I was regularly doing 100-105 APM in this matchup.

Matchup	Map	Length	APM	Opening
PvT	Othello	15:34	89/86	Reaver Drop
PvT	Othello	7:52	90/88	Reaver Drop
PvT	Othello	8:39	94/93	Reaver Drop
PvT	Othello	23:22	98/96	Reaver Drop
PvT	Othello	17:11	86/85	Reaver Drop

 

This is annoying. Being out of the loop even for a short while has serious implications for how fast I am. My suckiness seems infinite at moments like this.

Now why would it take me more than 10 minutes to beat the computer? Well, first of all: The entropy mod is a lot better than the regular AI, but of course still beatable in less that 10 minutes. But I use this as an exercise and refuse to do things like SCV-pulling or other cheeses against the computer.

When playing the games I realized how often I would create an assimilator on 11 and then forget to put probes on it to mine gas. Stupid me.

New York and Ladder Maps

I am going to New York for a little more than a week and won’t be playing Starcraft for 10 days or more. Yeah I know: You don’t care (although you should, since that means slightly fewer easy wins on iC Cup ;-) ).

In the mean time I hope that Blizzard gets their act together and releases some new Starcraft II information or even better announces the beta! Yeah, I don’t believe that either although it would be a really nice present upon my return to sunny Denmark. I can hope and at least Starcraft II will probably not be foremost on my mind for a week.

I recently discussed the old ladder maps with a friend. I think of the maps from before patch 1.08 or so. If you look at them again you have to agree that they were pretty bad. Some of the things we take for granted today like an easy first expansion and a choice between a mineral-only or one with a geyser were rare. Actually only River Styx looks marginally like a modern ladder map and ironically it was banned in patch 1.03 to make room for disasters like Gauntlet and Green Valleys! I think the last was by popular demand. At least I remember hanging out in Starcraft DNK-1 discussing the merits (or lack thereof) of GV as a ladder map.

I think we have the Koreans to thank for Starcraft as it is today and I hope that Blizzard have learned a lot from KESPA when it comes to Starcraft II as an esport.

You know what to do

There are some situations where you know what to do, but for some reason you do nothing or do something else. It is probably just a lack of practice with those specific situations, but it doesn't make it any less frustrating.

Yesterday I got canon rushed on Lost Temple. I saw the pylon go up and rather than kill the pylon or even just the canons with my own probes, I did nothing. Later, when the first two canons had warped in, I attacked them with my few zealots.

After the game I wondered why I did not snipe his probe. The first canons were way out of range of anything important, so had I just sacrificed a few units to kill the probe, the push would have been contained.

It amazes me that I can still do stupid things like that.

Payback

I rarely gloat about my victories since they are few and often the result of me running into even suckier players than myself. I'll make an exception here though. In a moment of insanity Michael of Redusgaming had proclaimed that ofcourse he could beat me not just as Terran, but as Zerg and Protoss as well.

First we played a Protoss vs Zerg on Longinus where I beat him up pretty badly despite the fact that I had never played the map before.

I did not defend properly against his mutalisks, but my counter was way more powerful than his raid on my minerals. Twice I got off psi-storms that would have made JangBi proud and the fact that his mutalisks hit were sitting still, was probably unrelated to my opponent not paying attention.

The second game was another glorious victory were I, playing as Terran, got to teach him a lesson in how his race of choice should be played. Or something like that ;-) At least I won after a really long game where my vulture raiding combined with him throwing tons of units away in a head on assult, sealed the deal.

Actually the last game holds a very important lesson, and that is to always prepare for vulture raids. Even a couple of canons at each expansion would have made the game a loss for me.